Ralph Waldo Emerson said, "I ask not for the great, the remote, the romantic.
I embrace the common." And a little bit of each was on display last Wednesday
night at Collector's Night, an evening of "Collecting, Collectors, and Collections."
From a mint-condition 1969 Orange Sting Ray Schwinn to a compilation of scrap
paper used to test pens at stationary stores, these collections (and their owners)
are an inspired bunch.

Collector's Night was sponsored by the City Reliquary Organization of
Williamsburg, Brooklyn and emceed by the Reliquary president, Dave Herman.
The night got underway with a slide show from expert collector, Richard Roth.
Roth led the audience through several famous collections, and introduced us to
a few of his own, including his powerful and disturbing series of pictures
depicting grief in everyday people. The passion for his work was obvious as
he claimed that collecting is the indigenous art of our time and that Noah was
the first collector, since "he achieved the complete set."

West Virginian arts collective, The Poo Syndicate, premiered their outrageous
film, The Flea Market Project. Filmed at several different flea markets in Southern
Ohio and West Virginia, the brave Poo members encountered some of the strangest
and yet oddly endearing people imaginable. With their help, we met Retired Irene,
who travels throughout the country selling odds and ends while scaring off convicts
and cooking up home remedies for poison ivy. We also met a man who claims to
have invented the space blanket, until of course NASA ripped him off. Not to be
outdone was a man who gleefully told our intrepid narrators about the torture
chamber he discovered while cleaning out someone's attic.

The most moving part of the night was a presentation by StoryCorps, an
oral history project currently based in Grand Central Station. StoryCorps invites
people to conduct 40 minute interviews with anyone they wish. The interviews
are recorded and installed at the American Folk Life Center in the Library of
Congress. The project has been running since Fall of 2003 and so far has collected
about 2000 stories. They plan to continue for another nine years and hopefully
amass a total of 250,000 stories. We listened to a few brief excerpts from the
collection. Some were funny, like the elderly woman who tells of her first encounter
with a magazine of "spicy stories". Even more powerful were the sadder stories, like
the man who recounts the moment he heard his father had died. In the midst of his
account, he pulled out his mother's engagement ring and proposed to his girlfriend,
who was conducting the interview. We could barely hear her "yes" as she sobbed
into the microphone. It was chilling to hear such raw emotion from a stranger,
someone whose face we can't see and will probably never meet. Surely these stories
are worth collecting.

But everything is worth collecting to someone out there. And that brings us to
the real stars of the night's event, the collections themselves. From pez to bobblehead
dolls, from 8 tracks to eyeballs (plastic ones, of course!), a multitude of treasures were
crammed onto these humble folding tables.

Christina collects "Dead Umbrellas," as the pithy sign on her table announced.
She has over 40 crushed, mangled, and ultimately discarded black umbrellas, all
found while walking through Williamsburg and Greenpoint. Perhaps someday she'll
extend her collection to include finds in other neighborhoods, but for now, she says
she's "not ready to ride the subway while carrying these things!" Fabio collects
8-track cassettes, and laments that the table only has room for a small part of his
collection. When I ask him which one is his favorite, he quickly asks me to clarify if I
mean favorite album, or favorite cover art. He proudly showed me some of his rarer
pieces, like The Heliocentric World of Sun Ra and the soundtrack to the Story of O.
At another table featuring cicada figurines, I overheard the collector telling a story
about a piece of graffiti found in the London Underground. According to him, some
people thought it was a moth, but "there's no way that's a moth. Just look at the head.
Everything about that says it's a cicada. The picture looked like a moth to me, but
then, he would know!

During a panel discussion, several experts discussed exactly why people
choose to become collectors. Some people look for items because they represent
their childhood or past memories. Others collect things because they are rare and
hold monetary value. Still others want to make a statement or convey an emotion to
others. When I asked Elijah, the youngest collector present Wednesday night, why
he collects Yu-Gi-Oh cards, he gave me a strange look and said, "I just like them!"